no title

Social progress required federal action

Letters Policy

The Dispatch welcomes letters to the editor from readers. Typed letters of 200 words or
fewer are preferred; all might be edited. Each letter must include name, home address and daytime
phone number.
Dispatch.com also posts letters that don't make it to print in
The Dispatch.

Letter writer Don Zapsic Jr.'s brilliant assessment of modern tribalism articulated important
issues that need to be addressed for the good of our country's future (“Government policy promotes
tribalism in U.S.,” Sunday).

He stated, “A not so-surprising source of tribalism in America comes from the federal
government.”

Later, he wrote, “As a result, we tend to think of individuals in terms of race, religion,
national origin, age, gender, sexual orientation and even culture.”

I entirely agree, but no social justice would have been achieved without decisive actions at the
federal level. I grew up in an era of lynchings and culturally enforced segregation, in flagrant
disregard for the U.S. Constitution. The feeling at the time was, well, that's just the way things
are and always will be.

And later, I myself, while intellectually agreeing with school desegregation, fled to a rural
community so my youngest child wouldn't be bused to an undesirable neighborhood in the city. As a
result of actions like mine and the ill-conceived remedy of busing, large urban school systems have
suffered. Witness the poor academic performance, records falsification, alleged cronyism and even
bid-fixing in the Columbus City Schools.

The conclusion is that the culture has to be changed before any improvement over tribalism can
be achieved. In our country's case, the marginal success in social justice we have achieved never
would have occurred without the stick-in-the-eye pain of civil-rights legislation and its vigorous
enforcement. The dichotomy of this legislation is that along with rights comes responsibilities.
Many of us have fallen short of this ideal, but those are the vagaries of human nature.

Some of the sad things occurring now are the states’-rights arguments being promulgated by such
groups as the tea party and conservatives. Some of the rights issues mentioned in my second quote
of Zapsic never should be infringed upon by any ascendant “tribe” due to its cockeyed tradition or
ignorance.

There is truth to the adage that you can't legislate morality, but there also is the potential
for persecution by majority, so we must not defy or defile the Constitution of the United States by
either ignorance or design.